Spin Off
by sapphireswimming
Summary: Writing was hard. But if there was one thing worst than putting Sam and Dean through cliché plots like The Bugs and The Seven Deadly Sins, it was running out of ideas entirely.


**Whoops I somehow made it through July without posting a superphantom fic?**

**This has spoilers for Chuck's existence and through season 5, I guess? Does that cover my bases? XD **

**Inspired by Chapter 6 of the superphantom collection _Inspired_ by Ittickleslikecrazy (heh, how's _that_ for irony?) And for anyone interested, there is also some more Chuck in Anthrop's _Life's Made of Trouble_.**

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**Spin Off**

August 2, 2014

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Chuck groaned and rubbed his face, trying to ease some of the pressure around his eyes and temples but to no avail. Not that that came as a surprise. He should have been used to the migraines by now, but somehow, each one still seemed to attack him with an intensity that he couldn't believe.

He tried to roll up into a sitting position, then stopped to rearranging his sleeping robe which had gotten pinned underneath him tight enough to keep him at a forty five degree angle, and finally sat up straight.

Without bothering to look up, he reached for the bottle of whatever he'd had left in his house—not nearly strong enough for this sort of thing and he really did need to keep a better liquor cabinet for how often he had to go through this—and ignored the glass sitting beside it.

He took a pull straight from the bottle and coughed a little at the sting it sent through his nose. The warmth trailed too slowly down the inside of his chest but didn't bring any relief to the overwrought pain sensors in his head and didn't have enough burn to distract him with a different kind of pain than the one pressing in on every side of his head just now.

Pulling a hand down his face, Chuck blinked hard in an attempt to see straight. Then wondered why he bothered. Wasn't like he could actually clear his head once his writing process had started. He knew that from his agonizingly long nights of experiencing the adventures of the Brothers Winchester in Prophet-vision with excruciatingly invasive surround sound.

Plus, the view of his various scratch papers scattered around his laptop and the neglected kitchenette beyond weren't worth looking at with unblurred eyes.

His headache was starting to get worse. The pervasive pressure in his skull was now joined by stabbing sensations. Chuck took another swig just before the pain lanced through his head again and almost made him drop the bottle. Catching it, he safely deposited it on the end of the table again with as large a sigh of relief as he could manage before he collapsed back onto the couch and submitted to the inevitable.

He groaned into the couch cushion as the first wave of images began to wash through his brain, swirling around it with no regard to the muscles and memories he already had up there. One scene surged into his head and pushed past the barriers he desperately tried to hold up to stop the overwhelming flow. It crashed against his skull and cascaded through his brain until he wondered if it might not be pouring out of his head. But it couldn't be, not the way they kept coming and filling filling filling every part of him, taking control as they shoved a hurried flow of events on the other side of the country into his brain.

If it weren't for the pain assuring him that yes, he was all too alive, he might have thought that he had ceased to exist. That he had been pulled apart by the barrage of images. Or that he had become them.

Closing his eyes tighter, Chuck began the twitching phase of the ordeal, trying to ride out the waves of an unfolding future long enough to start distinguishing the things that he was seeing. The scenarios that he must write for at least a little part of the world to read. The ideas that had, apparently, come straight from God in Heaven to Chuck in the middle of absolutely nowhere.

But he tossed and turned on his couch now, bewildered by the things he was seeing.

While there were normally some common themes in the visions he got—Sam, Dean, glasses of whiskey, their sleek black impala, and whatever the featured monster of the week was—that was lacking now. There was nothing familiar to cling onto. No packing of salt into shotgun rounds. No calls to Bobby Singer. No angels, even.

He felt adrift, with nothing to cling onto as he rode out the rest of the vision. Clutching onto the pillow that had started out beneath his head did nothing to help; he could find no purchase or place of safety as he thought he was drowning in his own mind.

There was a boy he had never seen before. And Chuck couldn't help screaming when the kid did, maybe not experiencing the pain of the events in his head, but his brain at least being seared by the bright flashes of light that he seemed to be encased in and unable to escape from no matter how hard he writhed on his couch and twisted his bathrobe between his hands.

Eventually, though, the vision died down and the steady stream of images drained out of him, leaving his brain stinging and sloshing around in his head.

For a few minutes, he did nothing but breath in and out, trying to calm his heart rate and recover from the perks of being force fed his stories. Then he decided it was time for a drink. After three tries, he managed to find the bottle again, but waited another moment before trying to hold it on his own power and without the tabletop beneath it to make sure it didn't fall to the floor.

He hated losing his sea legs, and he nearly fell over as he traversed all of the two steps from the couch to the chair in front of his computer. Collapsing heavily into the chair, he took a well deserved drink. And then another couple as he raised the lid and brought up a blank document.

He stared at it for a while, though, without doing anything, because he wasn't quite sure what to do.

Being a Prophet of the Lord was complicated.

At least his job description seemed simple enough: write down whatever he saw the Winchesters doing. And trying to edit out every single possible typo because, as Dean had said, this was going to be the New New Testament. And he didn't want to be known as the guy who messed up God's prose so badly that he was found before his computer literally struck down by Heavenly vengeance and with all copies of his further manuscripts either burned to a crisp or mysteriously deleted off his hard drive. That wouldn't be much of a prophetic legacy, although if it was publicized enough it might actually boost his purely authorial sales.

But he hadn't seen either Sam or Dean in this last vision. He knew it was a vision because it felt exactly the same as the ones he normally got about the Winchesters, complete with brain-killing daggers of foreign images invading his mind. Nothing was different this time except the subject matter.

And he didn't know what that meant.

The Winchesters were what he _did_. They were the ones he was supposed to be writing about, so why would he suddenly get a vision about some random kid? Did this mean he was going to have to endure another one to connect the dark haired teenager to the hunters he specialized in? Should he wait to write any of it down? Maybe it was all a mistake. Maybe he wasn't supposed to see that one at all and there was another pseudo prophet out there who did the other persons of Heavenly interest during this millennium who should have gotten that vision.

But he'd never had an entire vision before without seeing a new story line for the two brother hunters. Did this mean… that he was done writing for Sam and Dean? Were his days as a prophet over? Or had the angels found someone else with better prose to set down the rest of their story?

He wouldn't blame them.

Maybe he had been demoted down to prophet number two now. Which meant that the other guy got the Winchesters and he got… whoever on earth he had just seen. It made some kind of sense to him, Chuck thought. At least, about as much sense as anything in his life did after two of his fictional characters came knocking on his door to inform him that everything he'd been writing about was oh so real.

He hoped, though, that that wasn't the case. He hadn't seen the next step in the Winchester's journey. He didn't want to be left out of the story completely, having to rely on someone else's writings to figure out what was happening to them. After being so intimately connected with them, after having met them and helping them, and, yeah, getting threatened by them, it was hard to imagine anyone else taking his place. Especially since, who knew when the other guy might publish the rest of their chronicles? The original Bible had taken hundreds of years to compile, right? He didn't want to die without knowing what was going on.

Chuck froze as he realized something else. Sam and Dean were still his characters. They were his livelihood and the Supernatural books were the only way he could put the little bit of food on his table and the leaky roof over his head until he was able to pound out another manuscript.

If he lost that…

He turned to the computer with new determination. He would write out the vision that he had just seen. If it didn't end up having to do anything with the Winchesters… if this really meant that he was losing all inspiration and insight into the Supernatural books, well then at least he would have this. Hopefully the first book in a new series. He'd find a new pen name and he'd make this work.

First things first, though.

He needed a title. Closing his eyes, he focused on what he had seen. The scrawny black haired teenager going to school with his two best friends. Coming home to a house with a lab built right into the basement. The gearing up, the trial run, the pressing of a button so small that he couldn't have imagined it might cause the agonizing screams he heard next. The complete altering of a DNA sequence so that there was something new in the world.

Chuck paused over the keyboard, then typed in: THE ACCIDENT

He nodded to himself, finished off the last little bit of alcohol in his bottle, and stared the computer head-on.

He would write this. He would write all of it and then he would have a back up plan in case he needed it.

And then he would call Sam and Dean, maybe figure out what was going on on their end. Maybe they hadn't finished up with the water spirit thing yet and he hadn't missed anything anyway. Or maybe they needed to head to Amity Park for their next case.

Either way, he would ensure that this worked out.


End file.
